About Wafer-Bumping.com ...

Wafer-Bumping was started by John Reche in 2003 from Tempe (AZ) to provide thin-film and advanced electronic polymer processing technologies services to the advanced packaging engineering community.

The goal of Wafer-Bumping is to help speed and improve the research, design and manufacturing of advanced packaging fabrication technologies and other technologies using thin film techniques and related materials.

Summary of Experience

John has many years of experience in sputtering, photolithography, related microelectronics fabrication processes and thin-film optics.

John started development projects using polyimides as dielectrics for thin-film products in the early 70's. At the time, work with polyimides was limited to a few large research labs such as RCA, Bell Labs, IBM, TI or Hitachi that applied for a patent in 1972 using PIQ (Poly-Isoindolo-Quinazolinedione) as ILD (Inner Layer Dielectric) to build bipolar integrated circuits. Since then, John has worked with dozens of commercial or experimental polyimides, as well as many other types of high temperature polymers.

John set-up his first complete sputtering and photolitho thin film R&D processing lab at GTE-Lenkurt in Vancouver, Canada. In this lab, he built experimental circuits using polyimide as cross-over dielectric. These circuits combined thick and thin-film hybrid technologies and flip-chip semiconductors supplied by Cherry's and Motorola. The purpose of the experiment was to provide a simple and reliable interlayer dielectric for two-layers interconnects.

In 1977, John joined the magnetic thin-film head developement group of Memorex in Santa-Clara (CA), where his responsibilities included developing polyimide insulated copper coils and finding a suitable ceramic material as substrate. Alumina titanium carbide was selected because it was the only non-porous material machinable, albeit with some difficulties, since its only use at the time was to make tool bits for metal machining.

By 1985 John built thin-film flip-chip memory modules with four polyimide layers and four interconnect copper layers for Hughes Aircraft Electro-Optics Division. This work led to the planning of a multichip module company in late 1986. The company started from bare walls in a Ventura's (CA) warehouse January 1st 1987. By June 1987, silicon substrate prototypes were delivered to an aerospace company.

The reason for building MCM-D in the late 1980's will sound familiar today: provide off-the-chip interconnect bandwith matching the semiconductors clocking rates, decrease power dissipation in I/O drivers with matched impedance, and reduce the volume and size of the circuits. The difference between then and now is a major push for low fabrication costs to satisfy the consummer markets . For most part, the early interest in MCM-D targeted satellites where the pay load was estimated at $10,000 an ounce, and advanced missiles or aircraft weaponry where cost is secondary.

His thin-film work led to building half a dozen clean rooms, sputtering equipment and control software for the machines. He also worked in thin-film optics, magneto-optics for data recording, and built Nd-Yag lasers. His thesis goal was to explore the fabrication of eeproms based on trapping charges between two dielectric layers. The dielectric layers were obtained by plasma anodizing a thin layer of aluminum deposited over silicon. Plasma anodization procedeed until all the aluminum formed a stochiometric aluminum oxide with a thin layer of silicon anodized below it.

John holds five US patents and is the author of over 60 technical papers or presentations at technical meetings.

John obtained a Bachelor and a Master of Applied Sciences in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His thesis was entitled: "The Preparation And Properties of rf-Plasma Anodized SiO2 & Al2O3 Thin Films
and Al-Si Schottky Photodiodes".

Confidential work:

We will not disclose the existence a relationship or of a contract with your company or use your company name in advertisements without your prior written consent. To secure our client confidential Intellectual Property (IP) we expect to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA).

NDAs are normally secured at the Corporate level and need to be completed before sharing any potential confidential or proprietary information. Following the NDA, the exchange of critical confidential or proprietary information should be formalized in a document such as a "Confidential Information Transmittal Record" (CITR).